Dear Reader:

This is my continued self-help effort using a few basic Buddhist principles. I am not requesting comments on what I am about to share. If you, dear member, would like to do your own self-help work, you are welcome to do it here on this thread, or on your own thread.

The poem, Hokusai Says: “Hokusai says, look carefully-He says pay attention, notice– He says keep looking, stay curious– He says there is no end to seeing– … He says don’t be afraid- don’t be afraid- Look, feel, let life take you by the hand- Let life live through you.”

The abuse I suffered growing up was delivered by my mother’s hands and words: her hands, her words. Tragically, she was abused when she was growing up, but the abuse I received was not by the hands and words of those other people who abused her, but by her own hands, her own words.  This makes her responsible for what she did to me.

Her hands, her words and the totality of her explosions of anger and histrionics destroyed the vast majority of my life. I am not getting any of that life back, the unlived life, the miserably lived life. I need to radically accept it, meaning to not want this past of mine to be any different than what it is, being that I can’t change it.

I need to let go of attachment to the idea of having had any other kind of childhood than the one I had, and for having had a different mother than the one I had.

I tried hard to not love her ever since I was a teenager, if not earlier. I felt aversion toward the feeling of love for her. But I have to let go of my aversion toward feeling love for her because I feel it every once in a while and I can’t help it. At the same time, I see that this love is about who I am (a loving daughter=> a loving person); it is not about who she is, or was (a loving mother). I feel love for her not because she deserves my love, but because I am a loving person.

I accept that much of traditional society generally stands by the abusive parent and against the abused child (especially when the abused child becomes an adult… and should be “over it”), so that when I hear or read this attitude stated yet again, portraying me as a bad daughter and a bad person for having no contact with my aging mother, I expect and accept it but I am not deterred by it and I will not resume any contact with my mother.

I accept again and again that the girl that I was- was blameless. An innocent victim, falsely accused.

I accept that my mother’s primary role in my life was not that of a mother, but that of an Offender, a Bully, a Villain.

I accept again, that (1) this offender of mine has her defenders, that there are people who will be motivated (if reading this post) to defend her and offend me by minimizing the harm and damage that she has caused me and/ or by accusing me of being cruel, non-forgiving, etc., and  that (2) her defenders may be (unlike my mother) nice and polite while offending me.

I choose to not communicate with  any one of her defenders (people who know her personally and people who don’t) if they insist on continuing to defend her/ offend me.

My whole life I wanted to help my mother because I saw her pain (she has shown it to me histrionically), I didn’t know that she has helped herself to me all these years by bullying me.

I will develop this boldfaced sentence: patrick wanis, behavior expert phd, “Let’s talk about the top 10 primary motives for bullying:… The simplest definition of bullying is repetitively being cruel to others who are weaker…Here are 10 reasons why children bully other children:

1. Power: The need for power is the single most significant characteristic associated with bullying behavior. Power is the ability to influence others. The bully may feel weak and powerless at home or may simply seek power as a means to feel significant and secure.

“2. Control: The need for control over others is closely associated with the desire for power….

“3. Revenge: The desire for revenge or retaliation after perceiving to have been slighted or wronged…

“4. Envy: Envy is the desire for something that someone else has often coupled with feelings of inferiority (i.e. ‘I cannot have what he has.’)…

“8. Quiet Permission: Some bullies do it because they can. Perhaps the parents allow it; the schools allow it (teachers do nothing….

“10. Pain and Tauma: The bully has been a victim him/herself – of trauma, harassment, abuse, humiliation or bullying at home or at school…”.

The above is about children bullying other children, so why am I including this in regard to my adult mother having bullied me? Because her bullying was not a  mature act. She behaved like an angry child and the above listed reasons perfectly apply to my mother.

Here is a quote from a bully (same online source): “When I finally identified a child whom I was capable of bullying, I jumped at the opportunity to release my frustration” – true to my mother.

Back to me: this is my mother’s motivation (see how I used the present tense, “is” not was- it was unintentional. The reason: her bullying feel timeless). Her motivation was primarily to release her frustration and to enjoy the feeling of having power over me. So, you see, she helped herself to me.

I just noticed my timeless comment in the paragraph above, it still feels like she is bullying me because the experience has a timeless feel to it. This is what anxiety is about, fear that’s there when no  longer in a circumstance of real or perceived danger.

My mother used to accuse me of planning to hurt her feelings and then going about my alleged, non-existent elaborate plan to hurt her .At times when I proclaimed my innocence, trying to show her, to make her see that it was not true, that I didn’t at all plan to hurt her, she insisted that she was right and that I was wrong, that I planned to hurt her. She argued against me, and in so doing, justifying her bullying against me… presenting it as a self-defense of sort.

She dismissed any and all informaton that stood in her way to bullyig me and focused on any information that she could distort into an alleged plan to hurt her. She had an idea in her mind and she built a story around her idea, refusing to listen to any ideas that will interfere with her story, twisting whatever I told her so to fit it into her story.

What I described right above felt to me like mental rape.

This is it for now. Again, a request to any reader who may be reading this: please do not comment on what I shared here, as this post is about self-help, meaning… me helping me. If you would like to do self-help yourself,  you are welcome to do something similar in regard to your life experience here on this thread, or on your own.

anita

Dear Reader:

It was posted on my thread yesterday, right above: “Clearly you didn’t listen the first time I asked so I will ask you again” – I didn’t listen the first time, what will happen if I don’t listen a second time?

What am I being threatened with?

And what is it that I didn’t listen to?

I started this School Bullying thread on May 2, nothing to do with the member who posted her implicity threatening message, threatening in tone.

On May 13, I posted a long post in this thread, in regard to my purpose of posting here: “to process my own experience with bullying (not school bullying, but Parental Bullying). It helps me to develop my thoughts when I type them and see if I gain a deeper understanding as a result. Please feel free to read or not to read what follows. My primary intent here is to help myself; my secondary intent is to potentially help another member who may be reading this post.” On May 16, I posted the second long post, with the same stated purpose.

In neither one of these two posts (nor anywhere else in this thread) did I mention the member Helcat. Neither did I quote her words or mention anything at all that she shared anywhere in these forums. Nothing whatsoever.

And yet, said member chose to invade my thread with an unspecified threat, clearly evident in the tone of her short post.

I am not addressing the member Helcat directly in this post (nor will I in the future) because I do not want to communicate with her. Seven days ago, on May 10, I posted to her in another one of my threads (a thread I started, Once a Victim- Always a Victim?): “I do not wish to hurt your feelings, I really don’t, but I don’t want to communicate with you anymore. I will not post to you following the submission of this post, whether you address me or not (please don’t). Goodbye Helcat and I wish you well!”

Following that post, she submitted FIVE posts addressed to me. Yesterday (right above) was the 5th.

Wikipedia on cyberbullying: “Cyberbullying or cyberharassment is a form of bullying or harassment using electronic means. Cyberbullying and cyberharassment are also known as online bullying.  It has become increasingly common, especially among teenagers… Harmful bullying behavior can include posting rumors, threats… Bullying or harassment can be identified by repeated behavior and an intent to harm”.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by .

* A 6th unwanted post addressed to me is right above. How many more will there be?

anita

Dear Helcat:

I apologize for expressing anger at you harshly and indirectly. I felt too hurt and too threatened to (1) be aware of my feelings,  and (2) to express my feelings clearly and directly.

In this post, I will do what I can to correct these two failings.

When I activated my three dormant threads from 2015, bringing them to the top of lists of topics, I took a risk: in these threads, I expressed my weaknesses and I know that there are people who… what’s the word… people who feast on other people’s weaknesses, people who get excited about using weaknesses so to hurt the weak.

I feared the above because my mother feasted on my weaknesses; she got excited when spotting an opportunity to shame and humiliate me.

My original post on the Attacked- thread was on Nov 13, 2015. I wrote there: “I had a short, split of a moment memory this very morning of how it felt. How it felt when I was attacked decades ago, as a child, by my own mother. How it felt: frozen, not moving, not breathing, not thinking” –

– a huge part of her attacks against me was about thoroughly shaming me, done privately and in public. She had gone on and on shaming me, on and on… and on and on… and on…  endlessly, on many occasions. She didn’t say one sentence to shame me, she vocalized a whole essay on each occasion: shaming me in any which way and in every way that crossed her mind, looking for words that would hurt me more. At each shaming occasion, she reiterated all her evidence in regard my  alleged defectiveness and inferiority, retelling all past incidents that are proof of my (alleged) severe, inexcusable and unforgivable defectiveness and inferiority.

Each shaming occasion did not end before she became physically exhausted. Hitting me across the face and elsewhere with her hands and kicking my body with her feet were part of her physical exhaustion.

Being shamed so extensively created such emotional/ physical pain in me… It is that pain that I felt last night, lying in bed, going over our recent communication, a pain across my chest, a throbbing pain.

In my communication with members, if I express a weakness (anxiety, emotional trouble), I tend to misinterpret members’ well-meaning expressions as shaming. For example, a member’s “I am sorry” response tends to make me feel bad because I read the message as: poor you! , with a degrading tone to it, as in pity one expresses to a person he/ she considers defective and inferior.

I am aware of this tendency and talk sense to myself when it happens, re-interpreting the expression when I see no ill-will on the part of the member.

Looking back at the three reactivated threads, the only objectively offensive replies i received from you were to my update on the thread Attacked-.

In that update ten days ago,  I shared with pride (not pride as a sin, but pride as the opposite of shame, pride as in self-esteem and self-respect) that growing up, I developed a variety of disorders (Tourettes, OCD, Major Depression, an Eating Disorder, and a Personality Disorder), but after much work- work that includes daily posting in these forums for over 7 years- of the disorders I listed, most “are pretty much resolved, and most of the distress in regard to the tics (as well as the frequency and severity of the tics) is gone, all as a result of my intensive healing since 2011“.

Do you now see the pride in the words above?

In your first reply to the above, you mentioned nothing about my healing, and the incredible resolution of the disorders with which I was diagnosed, disorders (other than Tourettes) that I no longer suffer from. All you focused on was the anxiety that I still suffer from.

In my reply to your discouraging post, I repeated what you missed: “my anxiety levels used to be very high for decades; much lower now” and “I feel significantly less anxious on a regular basis than I used to“.

In your next post, you challenged me on what I wrote right above, arguing (as I am typing this, I notice increased tics, tourett’s tics…  this is stressful for me), saying, paraphrased: no, your anxiety did not significantly lessen, it is still severe!

In a 3rd or 4th reply, you wrote: “It is however important to acknowledge your anxiety since you have difficulty with daily living activities”-

-as if I didn’t acknowledge that I still suffer from anxiety. I acknowledged it plenty in my updat on May 10, plenty. It’s just that I focused on another kind of pleny, the plenty of healing and success!!!

I want my healing acknowledged, even praised! I don’t want my sickness to be the focus (plus, in none of my posts on that thread, did I ask members for advice or for help).

I don’t want to continue to go over this communication as this tic in my neck is troubling me. So, I will take a moment to calm down and close this post:

The good news is that you are not my mother. If you were my mother, you would next take every opportunity to tear me apart, to shame and humiliate me. You would proceed to tell me again and again how wrong I am, etc.

Earlier, my emotions were intense and I distortedly projected her into you and for that – I apologize.

Your replies to members (and in the past, your replies to me), are empathetic and kind. So, I am glad you are here in these forums and I hope that you continue to post for as long as you would like to. I learned from our exchange. In my replies to members since our exchange- I focus on a member’s abilities and successes more than before, and I am careful, more than before, to not focus on a member’s inablilities and failures.

On the other hand, I am still angry at you, angry for dismissing my abilities and successes and focusing on my inabilities and failures, and then proceeding to agrue… (another thing I learned from our exchange: do not agrue against a member!)

I see the words above, that Lindsey62 wrote: “both souls could be kind“- okay, here it goes:

Dear Helcat: I am assuming you were trying to help me, not to hurt me and I appreciate your intent. I appreciate all your previous positive replies to me and to other members.  I forgive you for your imperfections and I acknowledge and apologize for mine.

If I had my wish come true, in regard to our communication, it would be that if you choose to reply to this post, that you will not continue to agrue. I wish that you’d accept that there is something for you to learn as a result of our exchange, and that as a result of this learning, you will do a good job next time when you reply to a member who is proud of his/ her healing and progress.

I intend to do a better job at it myself. I apologize and regret any and all distress and discomfort that you experienced recently, as a result of our exchange. I do not (!) want this  distressing experience, neither yours nor mine,  to repeat in these forums.

anita

Dear Helcat:

Thank you. I appreciate your time and the care that you put into your post. Please forgive me for not reading the middle of your post. Following the gracious beginning I skipped to the end, which is gracious as well.

I will not post in this thread again unless a member who somehow gets here because of the title, School Bullying shares about the topic. If that happens, I will reply to what the member shares.

anita